American politics

Fact-checkers

Talking crap in Holland v America

THE entire front page of the Volkskrant, one of the three top Dutch newspapers, is taken up today by an article about the misleading statements and inaccuracies in Paul Ryan's convention speech on Wednesday. This is interesting largely because the Netherlands is in the middle of its own election campaign, a pretty vicious one in which the leading parties are the laissez-faire Liberals and the far-left Socialists, and the vote is scheduled for September 12th. So you'd think the newspapers would be more occupied with their own country's political business than with controversies about who is or isn't lying in the American presidential campaign. One reason for the attention is that America really is a pretty important country. The other reason is that the story is piggybacking on an analogous controversy that's kicked up this week in the Dutch elections over truth, neutrality and budget assessments, and the comparison is instructive.

The Dutch have a system intended to avoid the sort of fact-free insult-hurling that has plagued America's presidential race this year. The discussion in America over the rival candidates' budget plans has taken place in a vague and undefined discursive space, largely because the Romney-Ryan campaign does not actually have a budget plan. Mr Romney says he will keep the Bush tax cuts, slash income tax rates across the board by 20%, eliminate capital-gains tax for income under $100,000 per year, maintain defence spending, restore the $716 billion over ten years which the Obama (and Ryan) budget would have cut from Medicare outlays, and shrink the budget deficit by closing tax preferences, none of which he specifies. This doesn't add up, as the Center for Tax Policy found last month, but it's hard to say just how it will fail to add up, because Mr Romney has no item-by-item budget plan; we really have no idea how much he proposes to spend if he's elected.

In the Dutch electoral system, this can't happen. Two months before the elections, every political party is expected to submit a detailed budget plan to a non-partisan agency called the Central Plan Bureau (CPB), which plays a role similar to the Congressional Budget Office in America. The CPB produces an analysis of the economic consequences of those budget plans. The effects are assessed in detail for 2013-2017, and there's also a prognosis for 2040 to discourage parties from larding up their budgets with short-term candy that leads to negative long-term consequences. The CPB's report came out Monday, and most parties had their strong and weak points. Of the two parties most likely to win the elections, the Liberals did well on deficit-cutting and long-term job creation but hiked income inequality and hurt household purchasing power; the Socialists did well on purchasing power and jobs in the short run but had low employment growth in the long run.

The Socialists, however, were angry about a separate point: the CPB found their plans to reduce free-market competition in the health sector would lead to waiting lists. The Socialists say this isn't true, that it depends how much you're willing to spend on the sector, and they say that question doesn't fall within the CPB's remit; they're not health-care experts, they're economic experts, and they're expected to simply report what the economic effects would be. That disagreement came on top of Socialist anger over another health-care clash during a candidate debate last Sunday. In the debate, the Socialist candidate, Emile Roemer, started to lay into the Liberal candidate and current premiere, Mark Rutte, for proposing to increase out-of-pocket expenses in health-insurance plans. Mr Rutte immediately denied that he had proposed to do so. Mr Roemer, like most political observers who believed the Liberals' plans to raise the out-of-pocket limit were public knowledge, was flummoxed. It turned out after the debate that Mr Rutte had worked out a complicated theory that his party's plans constituted a transfer of some types of expenses from one category to another, rather than a hike in out-of-pocket expenses as such; but fact-checkers ruled this claim was false, and that the Liberal proposal was basically a hike in the out-of-pocket limit. In the meantime, however, Mr Rutte had effectively shut down Mr Roemer's attack in front of prime-time viewers. Mr Roemer was widely agreed to have lost the debate, and the Socialists have declined in the polls this week.

The upshot is that, just as in America, the Dutch media are tossing around the question of whether neutral evaluations in the political campaign are worth anything. Some question the usefulness of the economic models the CPB uses, which (like all economic models) have never successfully predicted what the economy will do several years down the road. Others wonder whether the Dutch public pays any attention to fact-checkers, or whether a politician is better off scoring a telling point even if it turns out not to be true. Hence the headline of the Volkskrant article, which refers to the controversy over the Republican campaign in America but might as well be talking about the Dutch one: "The results count, not the truth".

What the comparison with the American example points out, though, is that, for all the current media scepticism, the mechanism of the CPB evaluation dramatically raises the caliber of the electoral debate in the Netherlands. Obviously such assessments are to a large extent artificial: the actual budget of the Dutch government will look nothing like any of the proposals submitted by the parties, because the government will be a coalition of several parties, and the budget will be the result of a negotiating process. The same thing happens in America, where the president's proposed budget bears only a vague relationship to what ultimately emerges from Congress. Nonetheless, by forcing each party to commit to hard numbers in its budget proposals, the CPB evaluation tethers the Dutch political debate to fiscal reality. Even the Socialists, the party most often accused of fiscal irresponsibility, have presented a plan full of cuts and tax hikes that eliminates the budget deficit by 2017. Arguably, this bias towards austerity is pro-cyclical and a bad thing in a liquidity trap; perhaps the Dutch system encourages too much probity, but that's a separate subject. The point is, it is simply impossible, in the Netherlands, for a political party to end up systematically ignoring math and accounting the way the Republicans have at least since George Bush's campaign in 2000.

Could we institute something like this in America? No. We can't. The reason is that in America, there are only two significant political parties. It's impossible for a neutral arbiter to preserve its public legitimacy when ruling on subjects of partisan dispute in an election if there are only two disputing parties. Neither side will accept the referee's judgments. The reason it works, for the moment, in the Netherlands is that there are currently ten parties represented in parliament, four to six of which are major contenders. That spreads the political polarities out in different directions and creates more space for neutrality.

Hopefully the Dutch will continue to recognise the value of these refereeing institutions despite the current bout of fashionable, world-weary "ah, but what is truth?" pique. As to why the American press is becoming disillusioned with the fact-checking project: a lot of it has to do with the country's debilitating division into just two bitterly opposed political parties. It's no surprise that this kind of Manichaean political landscape sucks away the space for any legitimate neutral arbiter. Imagine what would happen to the legitimacy of baseball umpires if there were only two teams in the Major Leagues, playing every single game against each other.

You fundamentally don't understand how American Democracy works. There are STATE GOVERNMENTS who pass the vast majority of laws that affect peoples lives. The two party system works because a democrat in Alabama can be radically different from a democrat in California. They only really come together on the national stage for entitlements and military. Since there are only 2 positions possible on entitlements, (we need more or less) we only need 2 parties. Also Americans are radically more conservative than Europeans understand and have a much more homogenous political character within regions. Like it is a fact that the Texan people are conservative so they send a conservative delegation to the congress. On the national stage it might look all partisan and crazy, but the states governments are noticeably more technocratic, homogenous and have a "get things done" attitude.

The three--almost four--missing budgets? I thought you guys had a constitutional requirement for a budget?

BTW, if there is no budget, how do you know your president is overspending? And why is he overspending? Isn't it your Senate that has the purse strings? If I'm not mistake, Obama had both houses of congress for the first 2 years of his administration, yes?

So Politifact's top lie of the year last year went to President Obama. It has 27% of his statements as mostly false, false, or "pants on fire." This is roughly the same proportion that Ron Paul has on the site. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi are neck-in-neck. Liberal, eh.

We do not educate so much of the world. We don't even educate ourselves. We provide professional training in vocational schools to a large part of the world's highly trained skilled laborers. Earning a PhD at any of those so-called elite schools is nothing more, really, than getting one's journeyman papers in a trade. Yes, a difficult trade, but merely a trade, nonetheless. The inability to distinguish between schooling and education is a common mistake made by the merely schooled; but never by the educated...

List up all the existing tax-exemptions and known loop-holes, including, emphatically,the use of off-shore tax-havens, with the lost revenues attributable to each item (rough estimates will do). Publish the list and ask Paul Ryan (Oh! Do not forget Mitt Romney, too. Or, he would resent the neglect.) what exemptions he plans to abolish and what loop-holes he intends to close.
It will be the simplest litmus-test for his or their characters. If they evades the question, as Romney did with regards to his tax-returns, they are charlatans out to con the Americans into more debt. (Remember what George W Bush did with his tax-cut.)
If they do not evade, then let us see how their supporters and super-PAC-donors react.

No matter who is in office, Obama or Romney, the president does not have the ability to force the Senate to do anything. If the GOP (or the Dems under a president Romney in the future) want to filibuster a budget proposal, there's literally nothing the president can do about it. It's all political posturing, and that's one thing I'm certain that no one in DC has too little of.

http://www.pewglobal.org/database/?indicator=1&survey=14&response=Favora...
"Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of the US?" The pct that said "favorable":
.........2008 2012
France 42% 69%
Germany 31% 52%
Russia 46% 52%
China 41% 43%
Mexico 47% 56%
Britain 53% 60%
Poland 68% 69%
Basically no change in the Arab world, some countries a little up, some a little down. Israel isn't listed in these years but it fell slightly from 78% in 2007 to 72% in 2011. Indonesia went the other way, from 37% in 2008 up to 54% in 2011.

It seems that following the general discontent of Ryan's "not intended to be a factual speech" speech (Ryan did not say that but I certainly feels this absolute golden line delivered by a an elected Republican official concerning his statement of Planned Parenthood activities being 90% or so geared towards abortion absolutely incredible) on both sides, the partisan hacks have fallen back on the idiom the facts are actually opinion.
Very reminiscent of how "climate change isn't happening" became "well it's happening but it isn't our fault"

The politicians in the Netherlands talk about nothing else than the CPB data from the moment that it was released. They refer to conclusions from the CPB, as if it are facts. I would like to hear more about their ideology and ideas. But unfortunately the only thing I see on television are politicians blaming each other that they will create more jobs, cause the CPB said so.

We in India feel Americans should count it as their blessings that they have only two major political parties to contend with . Our experience has been that when you have many parties , and in the event no political party wins a majority to form goverment on their own , coalition govt becomes a necessity . Coalition govt will always entail compromises and conservative policies only meant to keep the Government a float . India has been suffering from the ill effects of too many parties in the fray and the coalition party politics for too long and is longing for elections scenario with very few major political parties to work with .
Every country has its uniqueness which has served them better for long, no necessity to copy other systems . We have lot of respect for American election system .

I was exaggerating but there's a whole lot of misinformation about PP on both sides. I don't know if it's equal. I haven't attempted to quantify it nor do I think that's a useful exercise. In other posts we're talking about the disorganization of the Republican convention. We don't really prioritize here. We talk about everything from abortion to soda bans. We talk about the forests and the trees.

BTW, failing to confront misinformation undercuts your own credibility. For example, PP states that 99% of women use birth control which sounds like a number a North Korean pollster would produce. Turns out it excludes women who are open to pregnancy (e.g., those morally opposed to birth control) and includes withdrawal as a form of birth control. But it's harder to get that truth out when you're also spreading erroneous information about PP.

In addition to constantly attacking the Romney/Ryan campaign, perhaps the Economist will have the courtesy to highlight the extremely misleading rhetoric of the Obama campaign—it's total lack of even an outline of how to solve the fiscal crisis -- with is sole objective to only continue wasting more than a further Trillion dollars in defect in each succeeding year. At least the Republicans have an outline and some firm proposals—such as cloying many pf the egregious numerous loopholes in our ridiculously arcane tax system.

IMO it's even worse than you describe it. All of the policy stuff is just fakery; the same people own both parties. Whatever the outcome, they have their way. Beyond that, it's a lust for power for the sake of self-interest.

No, you don't know. You know the tax rate under Obama that Obama claims he will charge you based what you think your class is based on your income. What you don't get is that soon enough you will be categorized as one of the rich he says must pay their fair share.

Sooner or later you will be paying 90% under his centrally planned state.

This is a laughably absurd position to try and take. Multiple parties allow a far wider spectrum of beliefs to be represented, which is infinitely more democratic than the two-party system currently used by the United States. Not only can voters choose to vote for officials that represent their actual beliefs (the whole point of representative democracy), but officials who don't toe the party line (namely free market democrats, or republicans whose social beliefs aren't rooted in the 1860's) aren't immediately crushed by the political and financial capital of our beloved parties.

You however are likely the sort of person who disagrees with proportional representation because in America, it would probably pull the government to the left. But god forbid our government reflected the wants of the people, instead of the inflammatory remarks of the conservative political machine.